Posted in books, from the reading room on October 12, 2007| 7 Comments »
I search for life in dread deathin fearful disease for health,
in dark prison for liberty,
escape in a sealed room,
in a traitor, loyalty.
But my own fate from whom
I ne’er hope for the good
has with just heaven ruled
if the impossible I demand,
for me the possible is banned.
Know where this quote comes from?
What do you think about it?
Posted in from the dark room, from the reading room, philosophy, photography, science on October 12, 2007| Leave a Comment »
From Brian Broom’s Meaning-full Disease –
Goethe showed science a new approach…..of seeing the whole world symbolised in a flower, an animal, a pebble, the human eye, the sun; and to construct the world from
this flower
this pebble
that is to create anew and to investigate things not by analysing, but by placing them in the context of the whole.
Posted in from the reading room, perception, psychology on October 11, 2007| 31 Comments »
Check this out – it’s a simple and elegant little visual test which claims to show you whether or not you are right or left brain dominant.
Apparently, I’m right brain dominant. What are you?
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking
Posted in from the reading room, tagged blogging on October 11, 2007| 1 Comment »
Here’s a free online tool I came across. It’s called sitegrader. You can put in the url of any website (like your blog for example!) and it’ll find out how well connected it is by gathering figures from search engines and so on. You get an overall score. I got 63 today – which means, apparently, “of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 63% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness”
OK, for me, it’s just a bit of fun really, but one of the reasons to blog is to try and say something and if nobody can find you then nobody can read you, can they?
The site also makes recommendations on how to improve your visibility.
Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, humour, life, video on October 4, 2007| 3 Comments »
One of the things that depresses me most is the tendency to write off whole swathes of humanity by sticking a label on them and dismissing them. I sat on the train this week and two guys, a Scotsman and an American with a comb-over, spent the whole journey doing just that. Huge numbers of people were judged, given a label and dismissed.
Here’s an example “I work with medics. I know what they’re like. They’re only interested in one thing. Money.”
Here’s another “Everyone below the Mason-Dixon Line is an in-breeder”
Want more? No, I didn’t think you would.
So here’s a counter to all that. There is a beautiful piece of journalism in today’s Guardian about people with Down’s Syndrome. Read right down to the last paragraph – it’s the clincher! I meet people who says things like this every week. It never ceases to humble me.
And here’s another counter. Sugar Mouse in The Rain sent me a link to a video on youtube. (By the way, go see his blog. It’s lovely and he’s a lovely man) Here’s the video –
Thank you Sugar Mouse
Posted in books, from the reading room, life, philosophy on October 1, 2007| 4 Comments »
Robert C Solomon writes a lot about love in his book “The Joy of Philosophy“. In particular he argues that love is a virtue.
I am going…to defend what we now call romantic love, erotic love, as a virtue – indeed as an exemplary virtue. I want to defend what one might call enthusiasm as a virtue, the enthusiasm born of love’s attachments being the most obvious example.
and, later
The passionate attachment of one person for another is a virtue.
To love another, and to be enlivened by that love, to live a better, richer life because of that love, for love of another to be the source, the fountainhead of an enthusiastic, passionate engagement with life…….that’s the challenge. I don’t think we talk enough about this kind of love these days. In Professor Solomon’s terms we tend to think about love rather more “thinly”……we reduce it to something less than it can be.
As he says, love creates love –
Love tends to build on itself, to amplify with time, to find – through love – even more reasons to love.
Whilst it might be true that an unexamined life is not worth living, it’s even more true that a loveless life doesn’t feel worth living.
Love (or loving) itself is the virtue, a virtue so important that rationality pales in significance.
Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on September 30, 2007| 18 Comments »
Some books you can gobble down quickly like fast food, but some just need to be sipped and savoured. I’ve been carrying around and reading The Joy of Philosophy by Robert C Solomon (ISBN-13 978-0-19-516540-1) for the last two or three weeks. Got some strange looks from people on the train who could only see the first part of the title…….”The Joy Of” (bet they never worked out the next word was “Philosophy”!).
I really enjoyed this book. You know how sometimes you read a book and it seems to open doors for you? Suddenly you see or hear something differently and the world and the way you experience it has changed forever. I played with an idea for a story once. I called it “Quantum Days” because I wanted to explore the phenomenon, that we all experience, of those days when something changes and its so dramatic, or so significant, that the world is changed for us so completely that we feel now we’ve moved to a new level (like electrons jumping from one level to another in the atom – quantum jumps). Well I will get round to writing the rest of that story one day. Quantum Days can come about from reading something though. Occasionally there’ll be an “aha!” moment and your world will be changed. This is one of those books for me.
The central thesis of the book is contained in it’s subtitle on the front page – “Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life”. Throughout the book Professor Solomon uses a very interesting language device – the juxtaposition of “thin” and “thick”. For him, “thin-ness” of thinking is limited, reduced, somewhat sterile thinking. In particular it’s that form of rational thinking which deliberately attempts to be dispassionate.
my revolt against logical “thinness” is very much a celebration of the passions in philosophy and the richness they provide.
It’s amazing how in medicine as well as in philosophy (and I suspect in science too) the passions, or emotions, are frowned upon. There’s a belief around that “the truth” can only be discovered by the dispassionate, the disengaged, the distant, but Robert Solomon argues strongly against that. In fact he argues for the central importance of a passionate life. He doesn’t use the language of “subjective” versus “objective” but that debate fits well with his. I’ve always been amazed that anyone can think the subjective can be left out of health care (or even “controlled for”). The subjective self (an at least partially socially constructed self) can never be taken out of our experience. It’s just impossible to have an experience which isn’t coloured by, framed by, and reacted to by, the self. That’s why who the doctor is, is important in a consultation. Yet I’ve never seen a single research study in medicine which identifies and/or describes the therapists who are actually entering into the encounters with the patients. Sorry, I digress……..but that’s just one of the many trains of thought this book set off and running for me.
He questions the traditional notion in philosophy that a dispassionate thinking about life can lead to a “good” life
A virtuous life might be something more than becoming the congenial neighbour, respected citizen, responsible colleague, and affective zombie that many philosophers and contemporary moral pundits urge us to be.
Oh yes! I love that phrase “affective zombie”! Here’s more….
I do want to raise the question of whether mere proper living, obedience to the law, utilitarian ‘rational choice’ calculations, respect for others’ rights and for contracts, and a bit of self-righteousness is all there is to a good life.
What he is arguing for is a life of passion, an emotional life. What does he mean by emotions though? How does he understand emotion? Well, he definitely does not think we can fully understand emotions by studying brain chemistry, nor by psychoanalysis, or, I suspect, the research conducted into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Why not? Because he proposes (and this is one of his radical ideas for me) that we best understand emotions by not focussing on individuals but on relationships, behaviours, actions and society.
….an emotion is not a disposition: it is, first of all, an experience and a way of being-in-the-world
and, later,
it is the context and the social environment that make most emotions intelligible
and
an emotion is not so much an element or item “in” experience as it is the ordering of experience
I could go on……I’ve written down many quotes from this book. What is exciting for me about this thought is that it embeds the experience of emotions so firmly, so inextricably into the contexts of the world in which we live and it gives them a central role in our attempt to make sense of our lives and to act rationally and deliberately in life.
He writes a lot about love but I’ll explore that in a separate post. Let me finish this one with two more quotes from this stimulating book.
.
.
.
Emotions are strategies
.
.
.
I’m giving that space so you don’t miss it. Think about this. Are emotions the ways in which we effect change and make an impact on the world? Are emotions actually actions? What does happiness do? What does love do? Anger? Grief? This is a potentially liberating but also empowering perspective.
We too often opt for victimisation or cynicism, the products of our overactive faculty for blame and our extravagant sense of entitlement, or we take refuse in pessimism. But there are better ways to think about life…..
It’s the heroes not zombies argument. Instead of thinking that emotions just happen to us and that our experiences just happen to us, this perspective gives us the opportunity for a much more active and creative engagement in life.
Posted in from the reading room on September 19, 2007| 2 Comments »
One of the most interesting points made by Gerd Gigerenzer in his “Gut Feelings” is that in order to understand what has happened it is often useful to consider as much of the information you can collect as possible, but in order to assess something right now, or to make a prediction about the future, you can have too much information and it either confuses you or bogs you down in analyses.
One fascinating example he gives is of a competition to pick stocks and shares. Asked to pick from a given a list of 50 companies in which to invest an imaginary few thousand dollars, the experts and knowledgeable amateurs did a lot of research into the companies then constructed their portfolios in the light of this. Gigerenzer and his colleague went out into the street and asked a random 100 passers-by which companies in the list they recognised. They then made a portfolio of the 10 most frequently recognised companies and this is the portfolio which won hands down, beating ALL the experts.
He gives other examples of this phenomenon. Basically it seems that if we know absolutely nothing about a certain subject then predictions we make will be right no more often than they would by chance. If we know a LOT then our predictions are not great either. However, if we know just a bit, our predictions are very good.
He says this phenomenon is about using intuition rather than a rational analytic consideration of a problem and points out that this intuitive strategy works best in circumstances where uncertainty is high.
Posted in books, from the reading room, health, life on September 18, 2007| 5 Comments »
The relationship between intuition and reasoning has been cropping up all over the place for me recently.
I just read Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer (ISBN 978-0-7139-9751-4) and he gives one of the most cogent models of intuition I’ve ever read. He outlines what he calls “evolved capacities” – these are human qualities or characteristics which have evolved either genetically or culturally. They are language, recognition memory, object tracking, imitation and feelings like love. He makes a good case for the uniqueness of these capacities in human beings (claiming that neither other animals nor computer-based Artificial Intelligence have or ever will have them).
His model of intuition (or “gut feelings”) is that these evolved capacities interact with environmental structures around the individual and are processed through simple rules of thumb to produce what we recognise as gut feelings. I like this model. It fits well with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience and complexity science. I’m sure others will identify other qualities which fit with his idea of “evolved capacities” and I think the adaptive nature of rules of thumb applied appropriately in different contexts really works.
There’s no doubt that rationalism and logic are only two of the tools we use to understand things and I think Gigerenzer’s model of intuition highlights a major other set of tools which we use (maybe even more frequently than we do reasoning and logic). I also think it’s good to take the mysticism out of intuition and to distinguish it from simple guess work.
In this way of thinking intuition can be both developed and taught and I find that pretty exciting.
One of the key points he makes is that intuitive processes are especially helpful when dealing with situations which are very uncertain – prediction for example. This highlights a role for intuition in everything from health care to investment decisions.
I’ve long been aware that the practice of acute medicine in particular requires rapid intuitive skill – an over-reliance on data collection and analysis in these situations can be fatal. Right off the top of my head I can recall a child with meningococcal meningitis, a young farmer in rural Ayrshire with malaria and man with toothache who turned out to be having a heart attack. In all three of these cases I’m sure it was instant (and I do mean instant!) decision making that saved their lives. In each case the diagnoses were unusual for a general practitioner and none of them would have survived had I waited to do some tests before acting. I’m sure all doctors have had similar experiences – those instants where you “just know” that this is a serious life-threatening situation despite the lack of detailed evidence!
Uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of our lives and intuition is one of the key tools we need to deal with it.
Posted in from the reading room on September 16, 2007| 8 Comments »
When in Tokyo I always pay a visit to my favourite bookstore – Maruzen in Oaza at Maranouchi near Tokyo Central Station. I love the top floor with its interesting English language section and always find some book there that breaks new ground for me. This time it was Smart World by Richard Ogle (ISBN 978-0462099217). Unfortunately books can be very expensive in Japan and even if you can afford them luggage soon gets unmanageable when you stuff your bags with too many of them! So I decided to have a speed-read of this book at one of the reading tables by the window.
I don’t know if you ever speed-read a book but with non-fiction books its quite easy. Most well written books have good summaries at the end of each chapter so what I read was the introduction, then the summaries of all the chapters.
I read enough to be thoroughly fascinated by it. The author focuses on the new science of networks to create what he calls the nine laws of the science of creativity, his thesis being that creativity is an emergent process of the function of networks. He draws heavily on the ideas of Varela and others about the concept of the embodied mind – the idea that we cannot understand the mind if we attempt to contain it to what happens inside a skull but rather have to understand it as inextricably woven into the environments in which it exists. It’s a small step from here to the idea of the extended mind – a mind that stretches out to network with other minds. From here he develops the notion of “idea spaces” where we see hubs or “hotspots” develop in the network. In other language these are like the “attractors” of complex systems, or like the websites which attract huge numbers of visitors and links. Out of these hotspots, tipping points occur (you’ll have come across this term as the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s book. Again in the language of complex systems these are “bifurcators” where the system undergoes a “phase transition” into a totally new and changed state.
He links these ideas to the human facility of imagination and makes the point that if we progress solely on the basis of existing knowledge then we can improve incrementally but we never achieve the big, significant, creative leaps. These latter require us to imagine what doesn’t exist and what might well not succeed, but we leap, and when it works, the world has changed.
He gives numerous examples of this but the one that caught my eye was the ipod. The ipod has changed the music world considerably but for it to be created a number of elements had to fall into place – Napster and its success in spreading the habit of downloading music, the MP3 file as a small enough sized music file to allow easy downloading, the minaturisation of hard disc drives, and Steve Jobs move from Pixar where he had gained the respect and confidence of media companies which allowed for their licensing of their music catalogues to Apple, and Steve and his team themselves for their imagination, design flair and ability to create a product unlike any other the world had seen before – one that looked good, was SO simple to use and just worked.
I like these ideas and I think its interesting to read an author who uses the analogy of networks and network science to advance them. They are entirely consistent with what we learn from the science of complex systems.
Oh, I’ve ordered a copy of the book from Amazon Marketplace and hopefully it’ll arrive shortly after I return home. Then I’ll take a bit more time with it and see what other thoughts it provokes!
Heroes Not Zombies 